I have tried to configure a network boot environment for FreeBSD some years ago. Well, my trying stopped immediately after reading the documentation for this. If I remember correctly it requires a bunch of files on a TFTP server, a NFS share as root file system and settings in the DHCP server. While TFTP and…

I use iSCSI LUNs to increase the available disk space on one of my apu2 boxes at home. After patching iscsid(8) so it can connect to my Synology I’ve mounted the LUNs manually. For testing this is fine. Soon I have realized that the LUNs are going to be a permanent solution. Therefore, I have…

As a sysadmin I often use tools to access terminals on other systems. Most of the time this is ssh(1), sometimes it is telnet(1). Both have the command line flag -e. Using this flag I can change the default escape character ~ (a tilde) to something else. There is one tool in the base system…

For years, sysadmins like me were told that you could not run more than one DHCP server in a broadcast domain. Then the IETF created a draft for a failover protocol between two DHCP servers. ISC implemented this draft in the DHCP reference server. With Windows Server 2012 Microsoft implemented the same draft into their…

The iSCSI protocol, originally described in RFC 3720, which is now obsoleted by RFC 7143. This no big deal, because the newer RFC is a consolidation of the various RFCs about iSCSI. There is a standard, and both OpenBSD and Linux claim to base their implementations on RFC 3720. What could go wrong? My…

My home mail server complains about a full /var partition. Actually, the partition is not full. However, it does not have enough free space to update the malware database of ClamAV. Therefore, I have to do something about it. Unfortunately I do not have any free space adjacent to /var on the disk. So growfs(8)…

So there it is, your fresh installed system running OpenBSD. The sane default setting is to store the local mails in a local mbox. If you have set up a regular user during installation, this account is getting all the mails for root. So all the info mails from /etc/{daily|weekly|monthly} go to the local mbox….

At work, we run a VMware Horizon View (or whatever the correct name is right now) infrastructure. All clients are virtual machines, each user has a zero client at his workplace and we provide remote access to the virtual clients. VMware provides two mechanisms to access your virtual client from remote: Either you install their…

This patch is work in progress The current patch works, windows are raised ± after the defined delay. But transient windows – like dialog boxes – will not stay on top. I’m working on this feature. Testing and feedback are welcome. OpenBSD comes along with a window manager called cwm(1). It is my preferred window…

Introduction This post is about configuring a DNS infrastructure for the internal network using the two daemons nsd(8) and unbound(8). Both daemons are part of the OpenBSD base system, you don’t need to install any packages. NSD will be the authoritative name server for the internal DNS zone. Unbound will provide name resoultion services for…